by Ward Just
Loners lose, he said.
Teddy, my mother said, her voice rising an octave.
A father can speak his mind to his own son, he said.
Wils was sick, my mother said again.
And now he’s well, my father said.
When she retired to the kitchen to see about dinner, my father turned to the evening news. This was the month Hollywood personalities were testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Communist influence in the entertainment industry. The enemy within, it was called. Quarterday was on the margins of effective television reception from Chicago, so the picture was erratic, the screen mottled with visual static, “snow,” so that Chairman Velde and his committee appeared as phantoms. The witness was a phantom, too, an actor unknown to me but very well known to the prewar American Communist underground; he had since left the party but was happy to name colleagues he had seen at meetings. The quality of the sound began to fail, the hearing suddenly a flickering pantomime; and then Chairman Velde’s gavel crashed and the screen went black for a moment. My father nursed his drink while he listened to the news and then, in a gesture of reconciliation, asked me if I wanted a beer. I drank a glass of Pabst while he sat hunched in his leather chair, his eyes half shut, watching the pantomime. The line of muscles in his jaw worked to and fro, and all the while he was muttering, mostly to himself but partly to me, “Bastards ... lowlifes.” Artists, they called themselves, but they had no loyalties, not to their art, not to their country, not even to each other. They called themselves intellectuals but they’d sell their mothers for a dime and a film credit. Listen to them, he said, they talk like politicians, up one side and down the other. They did not have respect for a committee of the Congress going about its lawful business. It was alien influence, an unwholesome, un-American influence. The country was in a hell of a mess, altogether better off if both coasts were amputated and allowed to drift away, the East in the direction of Soviet Russia and the West to Red China, allowing the heartland to manage its own affairs.
Then I wouldn’t be in the fix I’m in, my father said.
At dinner that night I asked my father if Tom Felsen intended to run for the legislature this election or wait for the next. And if he ran, would he make a good candidate? Tom’s sound, my father replied. A small-government man, all for a balanced budget and lower taxes, a practical approach to things. Whether he’s a good campaigner, we’ll have to wait and see. Probably it won’t matter because he knows where the bodies are buried. Obviously he has the sheriff’s department behind him, so he begins with a solid base. Deputies know how to get out the vote. That’s why they’re deputies, he added with a smile. But he’s a good friend. I’ll support him.
He’s been a good friend to you, my mother said.
He’s gone above and beyond the call. Tom’s staunch. He’s the man to have on our side.
Loyal, my mother said.
You don’t want him on your wrong side.
Why not? I asked.
My father paused before answering, and when he did he lowered his voice as if he feared being overheard. Tom can be—rough, he said. Tom’s no-nonsense. Tom flies into the boards with his stick high.
My mother raised her eyebrows and looked at me. She said, Your father says that Tom Felsen keeps the lid on.
He nodded. There’s an unsavory element here, like everywhere else. Tom keeps things in check. He’s broken the rules, that’s for sure.
Rules? I said.
Whatever do you mean? my mother asked.
My father had grown expansive, enjoying the story. He pushed his chair back from the table and grinned as one does when disclosing an unsettling secret. He said, Tom knows their plans. The how and the when and the where. And when my mother looked at him strangely, my father steepled his fingers and looked across the table to the wall opposite, a hunting scene from the eighteenth century, supercilious Frenchmen in plumed hats accompanied by wolfhounds, chasing a stag through a country park, the scene repeated every few yards around the room. The glass chandelier cast little broken shards of light; and at the kitchen door, the Frenchmen, the wolfhounds, and the stag vanished.
He listens in to them, my father said at last.
Listens in?
We can talk about it later, he said.
There’s cake in the kitchen, my mother said to me.
Cut a slice for me, too, my father said with a bemused smile. He continued to stare at the French dandies on horseback, waiting while I rose from the table and retreated to the kitchen, where he mistakenly believed I was out of earshot.
Tom’s tapped their phones, he said.
Oh, dear, my mother said.
So he listens in. And shares the information.
With you, she said.
With me, he replied. I think he has some help. Someone at the FBI owes him a favor. He’s listening to them day and night, two deputies on the phones full-time. Calls between the national headquarters and the local here. Pretty rough stuff, what they say to each other. My father paused there and lowered his voice. If I could find a way to split them, to make our boys see that the national’s just a bunch of left-wing troublemakers, don’t have their best interests at heart, well, then, this strike would be over in a week. My father paused again and I imagined him staring across the table at the Frenchmen on their high-stepping horses and wondering what they were doing in his dining room. He said, The national sees my business as a test case. Win here, they win everywhere. They’re dug in for the duration. As long as it takes. They’re cocky as hell. They think I’ll throw in the towel, just give them whatever they damn want on a silver platter, same’s Roosevelt did at Yalta. That bastard Hiss. Same thing exactly. So it’ll go on for a while.
I returned with two plates of cake.
My father said, Did you hear any of that?
Some, I said. Not much.
Forget what you heard.
I heard you say it’ll go on for a while.
It will, he said. How long’s hard to say. As long as it takes. As long as they have their strike fund. And if their morale doesn’t crack. You know the secret weapon, when you’re management and there’s a strike? It’s the women. Mama goes a few months pinching pennies for groceries, the old man hanging around the house drinking beer and bitching because the kids’re crying and there’s dirty laundry everywhere and he’s gone most evenings to a union meeting and comes back smelling of more beer. Drives the women crazy, their husbands underfoot all day long. So they’ll settle eventually. They’ll settle because their wives’ll make them settle.
I couldn’t stand you around the house all day long, my mother said.
No chance of that, my father said. I’ll never retire. And when you own the company, you don’t go on strike.
I said tentatively, Are you worried?
He moved his head, neither yes nor no. He was picking at a slice of chocolate cake, edging it around the plate as if it were a hockey puck, apparently thinking through the answer to my question. Then he looked up suddenly, rising from the table and striding into the den, where he stood rigidly at the French doors leading to the terrace. He was looking across the terrace to the pond and the fairway beyond the pond and the green, rising in the moonlight. I thought I saw something, he said. Something moving. He flicked the switch that illuminated the arc lights in the trees surrounding the pond. Then he switched them off and darkness returned.
He said, You can’t be too careful.
Maybe when this is over we can take a trip, my mother said.
No one wins a strike, my father said.
A second honeymoon, my mother went on. She had a dreamy look, staring fondly at my father. The Caribbean, Havana. One of the boats that leaves from New Orleans. We could spend a day or two in New Orleans, dinner at Antoine’s—
That’s what gets lost sight of, my father said.
—and then a week in Havana. We could go from Havana to Curaçao. Dancing every night with an orchestra, black tie. Teddy, it would
be such fun. Get away from this for a while. It’s been such a long time for us, a vacation.
All that production lost, you never make it up. Wages lost, revenues lost because your customers don’t think they can depend on you to deliver. Rumors everywhere, none of them to your advantage. Teddy Ravan’s bust, his firm’s down the drain, you can’t count on Teddy. So your customers begin to trade with the competition, and your competition is only too happy to oblige. It’s business after all. The business has to go somewhere. These idiots talk about class solidarity but there is no class solidarity, on my side or their side, either. And you and the people who work for you are divided, suddenly on opposite sides of the ring, gloves off, no referee. Loyalty vanishes, and men you’ve known for years, you know the names of their wives and their children, they turn their backs because they see you as their enemy. The atmosphere’s poisoned, and some mornings you just hate to go to work. The bad blood can last for a generation.
Will you think about it? my mother asked.
Some business you lose, never comes back. And some days you just wish to hell you’d never gotten into it.
The vacation? she said.
Just give it to them on a silver platter. Here, take the damned business, you run it, you think you’re so smart.
I’d like it so much—
I’m sorry, what did you say? my father said.
To go away, just us two. You remember Havana, our honeymoon, the fun we had on the boat, we met that couple from Kansas City and played bridge in the afternoon and dined at the captain’s table and then, our last day in Havana, we all went shopping together and you bought me the antique cigarette box.
It wasn’t antique, my father said with a smile.
I want to go back, my mother said.
We’ll see, my father replied.
I’ll go by myself then, my mother said, but we both knew, my father and I, that she never would.
So much was out of sight, between the lines, a narrative vanishing like the Frenchmen on horseback where the wallpaper met the doorway. What remained was the last inch of feather on the Frenchman’s hat. At nineteen you are bored witless by the family stories, the Havana honeymoon story and the others, varied according to the point being made and the response that was expected. Then suddenly, without notice, you learned how the world worked, Tom Felsen tapping telephones with the assistance of the FBI, a favor given for a favor received, Tom “rough” in his determination to keep the lid on, owing to the unsavory elements, present in Quarterday along with everywhere else; so he flew into the boards with his stick high, a good man to have on your side—and somehow all this had to do with my father’s business and the strike. My father’s misprision was breathtaking and he must have had some idea himself along those lines because when the specifics were announced, I had been banished to the kitchen. But I did not fail to notice my father implicitly comparing himself to Winston Churchill, heroically struggling to hold the line at Yalta while Franklin Roosevelt absent-mindedly gave away half of Europe to the tyrant Stalin, thanks to that bastard Hiss. Naturally the presumption of it was comical; even at nineteen I found it comical. I was less amused at his martyred just-give-it-to-them-on-a-silver-platter conclusion; that was unworthy of him. Yet I knew without a doubt that my father had a hard-won understanding of how the world worked—and chose to dispense this knowledge with circumspection, a worldly Croesus distributing his wealth a dime at a time.
My father was preoccupied all that winter and spring, mostly silent at the dinner table, and later alone with a book until well into the evening. I watched him worry and he seemed to age before my eyes, settling into the peevish funk of an old man. I was watching him in order to learn what it was to be a man, with a man’s burdens, how to behave in adversity. I assumed this meant acting from the center of yourself, discovering your own natural motion and in this discovery learning just how far apart it was from the world’s natural motion, and how estranged you were likely to be. Would you and the world be on speaking terms? I knew that as a family we were on the outside of things, separated from each other and from the wider world, so mysterious and out of reach. At nineteen you inhabit a multitude of personalities, trying them on like hats, Siegfried Sassoon and Jake Barnes and Bogart and the great tactician Odysseus and Fats Waller and the bon vivant in chemistry class, all of them observed by the nurse in the nerves ward and Lady Brett and Ingrid Bergman and Calypso and Billie Holiday and the blond girl who bounced on the trampoline in the gym after school. Your father is the shadow of these multiple personalities, physically up close, his spirit far, far away. What animated him at nineteen? What lurid fiction has he made of his own early memories? Surely more than icicles as thick as your arm and the wind howling like wolves. Yet when my father said, “Sometimes you wish to hell you’d never gotten into it,” he sounded as if he meant life itself.
At nineteen you dread the occasion of courage in the way the Catholic Church dreads the occasion of sin, and when the moment came it helped if you had an idea of how the world worked. What it valued and what it threw away. How much you could get away with. You knew that the gods—perverse, malignant, cunning, capricious—were perched in the trees like vultures, eager to pick apart the virtuous and the wicked alike. Even at nineteen you knew there were occasions of high complexity, come and gone in an instant; and that there was a choice to be made and you made it or didn’t make it or made the wrong one, a consequence of the hat you wore that day. The films, the books, and my father hinted at the wider world, soon to be at hand, though perhaps not this year.
I had no idea what was in store—what goods were on the shelves and what birds were crowding the trees. Surely they would differ from my father’s. Meanwhile, I tried to coax life itself in the way that Fats Waller coaxed a blue note from his piano never looking at his hands.
2
MY FATHER was five feet ten inches tall and wide at the chest, built like a stevedore with the unhurried stride of a farmer. He never looked entirely comfortable in city clothes. He never wore a hat. His heavy Goya face looked as if it belonged on an alcalde or other unsympathetic municipal official. My mother was quite beautiful, tall and slender as a fashion model. They made a striking couple, her eyes green against a luminous complexion, his two points of the blackest ink, wide-set in a weatherbeaten face. My father’s bearing—you could almost say his “standing”—reinforced his ominous physical appearance. He was attractive to women because it looked as if he could handle himself and anyone else, and because he seemed to withhold so much. Women suspected, correctly, that he had a sentimental streak, something my mother had discovered years before on their honeymoon trip to Havana.
He had bought her a close-fitting ebony cigarette box decorated with a seventeenth-century Italian street scene etched in silver, Giacomo della Porta’s palazzo for Prince Chigi in Piazza Colonna, Rome. The loving way he handled it made her think that he had actually bought it for himself, though, truth to tell, seventeenth-century Italian street scenes were not in his repertoire of interests, so far as she knew them. When she asked him about it, my father smiled and said he loved the tiny figures, the cavaliers in their flared jackets, the fountain, and the formality of the palazzo itself, five stories of princely living, each horizontal row of windows of a different size and shape so that it seemed to him that five separate floors had been laid one on top of the other like a stack of books on a bedside table. He thought it represented a world unto itself, all other worlds out of sight and out of mind, and so much to imagine of the interior of the princely stories, the bedrooms and the reception rooms, the dining rooms with their glittering chandeliers, the chandeliers no doubt as brittle as the conversations that went on beneath them.
And also, the box was beautifully constructed, airtight it seemed.
It feels good in your hand, he said, and went on to speculate what such a valuable object was doing in a nondescript shop on the Calle Obispo in Havana. He imagined it the last heirloom in the estate of an impoverished aristoc
rat, perhaps a descendant of Prince Chigi himself, exiled by a vengeful pope to the humid and undisciplined Caribbean, sea of hated English pirates. My mother listened to this aria with mounting exasperation and said at last, But you must have it for your desk at the office—and realized at once that she had offended him.
It’s for you, he replied stiffly and then amended—a tactful amendment, for he had noticed her dismay—for us, for our bedroom or the cocktail table in the den, somewhere we can see it every day and remember Havana, our honeymoon. She was grateful for his diplomacy and said, Of course, what a good idea. With women generally, my father was courtly and always managed to ask questions that intrigued them. Do you ever wish you had been born in a different century, in a country different from our own? Could you ever have married an Italian from Italy and gone there to live, changing your citizenship, speaking Italian? My mother would watch his performance and roll her eyes, but she liked it exceedingly when she overheard a friend say, Doesn’t Teddy Ravan have the most wonderful smile? Yes, my mother thought, and the more effective because he used it so seldom.
In a room full of people, your eyes went to him at once because of his actorly quality of stillness, his face immobile as iron. Of course people knew that our house had been his family’s homestead and that his father had been a farmer but beyond that his early life was a mystery; not interesting, he said on the rare occasions he was asked, rising with the roosters and retiring with the hens. He seldom spoke of his childhood except for the unspecified adventures with Tom Felsen and the endless winters, the wind, and the wolves—fictitious wolves, I later discovered, wolves having disappeared from the northern Illinois prairie before he was born. However, the west wind was constant. I had the feeling that he and his father were at odds and I was not surprised, unable to imagine my father submitting to any authority except, conceivably, his mother’s authority. Then, many years later, I discovered a book in his library, a birthday present many years before, my father to his father: “To the best dad a guy ever had.” This was not his voice at all, and I imagined him hesitating over the inscription, finally writing swiftly in what I am certain was a flood of emotion. But what do I know of this? The childhood of our parents is forever inscrutable, the cave within the cave of our own. The light’s too dim, the dancing shadows unreliable, fundamentally unstable, even the impromptu photographs and private letters somehow contrived. These years might as well have occurred in the sixteenth century, the salient facts etched on a cigarette box and sold at auction, the box moving from hand to hand, continent to continent, like Hammett’s Maltese falcon. I was very young when my grandfather died, though I remember the flowers, the crowded church, the closed casket, and my father entirely composed and reading the eulogy in a gruff voice, his body rigid, a slight flutter of his hands the only show of emotion.